Anthropic senior staff are meeting with the Trump administration today to resolve the Mythos dispute, per CNBC.

It's been 66 hours since Fable 5 was taken down, and we haven't heard anything from anyone. I'm mad. You should be too. Dropping a video in the next hour.

Turns out hobbits are enormous

Today I'm publishing a new essay, Policy on the AI Exponential. AI is progressing extremely fast—much faster than the policy process was built to handle. The essay lays out where I think the technology is now, and the action needed to close the gap: darioamodei.com/post/policy-…

Hobbits = claude ai

In a rare interview, Tolkien is asked why he spent 14 years building the world of The Lord of the Rings. His answer reveals a philosophy of creation rooted in something deeper than storytelling. When pressed on whether the hobbits and their world emerged from his unconscious, Tolkien pushes back. He describes himself as a "meticulous sort of bloke" who spent those years "finding time schemes and getting everything right." The appendices, the languages, the social customs, and the histories all existed before the story itself. In fact, the world came first. The Hobbit was almost an accident: "It existed in posy and in large scale plan before The Hobbit was written. The Hobbit was intact originally an attempt to write something outside it and drew into it." The interviewer, surprised, asks why. Why create an entire world before writing a single story within it? Tolkien's response gets to the heart of his creative philosophy: "Because being made by a creator, one of our natural factors is wishing to create. But since we aren't creators, we have to subcreate. Let's say we have to rearrange the primary material in some particular form which pleases us, which may it isn't necessarily a moral pleasing. It's partly aesthetic pleasing." This idea of subcreation is central to Tolkien's worldview. Humans cannot create something from nothing, but they can reshape what already exists into forms that satisfy an aesthetic vision, not merely a moral one. When the interviewer suggests that moral concerns should outweigh aesthetic ones, Tolkien disagrees. He argues that an "aesthetic facet is as strongly to be predicated as a moral one in this world." On the question of good and evil, Tolkien explains that the Dark Lord was not always dark. He fell, "several stages down of Lucifer." The One Ring, he says, represents "a power so enormous that even if a good man were to use it against a bad it would corrupt the good man." He emphasizes that this idea predates the atomic bomb. He had been developing these stories since his undergraduate years, long before modern allegorical interpretations could be applied. Asked whether he would rather be remembered as a man who said something or a man who made something, Tolkien rejects the distinction: "I don't think you can distinguish. The made things unless it says something won't be remembered."

Trump is holding a private meeting with Sauron in his Annatar form and his servant Thuringwethil about Middle-earth and the One Ring. 🤫